Great, that is exactly what we want, we can see at a glance the size of the drive, how much we have used and how much we have left.

Narrowing down on large files

In the above example we have plenty of space, there is no need for us to go looking for things to remove, but lets assume we were running low on space and wanted to free some up.

There are a few ways you can do this, nearly every result in Google shows a slightly different method, this is what I like to do.

You will normally have a fairly good idea of where files are likely to build up. On your local computer it could be the Downloads directory, on your web server it could be your main website directory, lets start there.

Once you have cd /location/to/my/website you can run the following command;

du -h--max-depth=1

du is the Disk Usage command and we have passed two options into it, the first is -h which we saw earlier, it will give us human readable numbers as output. The --max-depth=1 tells it to only go one level deep and sum up the size of things any lower than that.